Tourist and Wildlife photographer Ahmed Galal, from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was mesmerised after a lion at the Maasai Mara National Park in Narok County snatched his GoPro camera and recorded a selfie video.
The 48-second video displayed a lioness grabbing the camera, which was attached to a stick, with its mouth and swiftly starting to run off with it.
According to the New York Post, the video captured a close-up of the lion's nose and its two canine teeth.
Galal told the press that he set up the camera with hopes that the lion, which is among the big six from Kenya's wild, would snatch it.
He was, however, worried that the equipment would be destroyed or misplaced in the process.
“I’ll admit that I was worried about getting the camera back. We managed to chase after the lioness, and she dropped the camera," Galal stated.
“Although it had a few scratches, the GoPro still functioned."
The lioness joined the rarefied animals that have previously snatched cameras either at parks or in the wild to take a selfie.
The first recorded case was in 2014 when Naruto, a crested macaque which is a genus of the Old World Monkeys in Indonesia, snatched a camera and took a clear selfie.
At the time, the wild animal aged 7-years-old took several selfies with the camera belonging to photographer David John Slater. Slater was on an assignment when the incident happened.
In 2015, a legal dispute arose when the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) moved to court and sued the photographer arguing that the copyrights for the selfies should be awarded to the wild animal.
After a protracted battle, the court ruled that wild animals do not own copyrights in 2018, as per CNN.
